This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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The Resurrection of ‘Klinghoffer’
Near a barren tree in the middle of a bleak, gray landscape, the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians mills about onstage. Wrapped in dark garments, their weary aspects suggesting immigrants at Ellis Island, they contrast starkly with the largely empty crimson-and-gold Metropolitan Opera House, its tiers of box seats wedding caked above each other. In the…
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Lend Me Your (Yiddish) Earlocks
Even if one is naturally curious, one often accepts strange things unquestioningly for what they are. I suppose that’s why I never wondered about the odd phrase di linke peye, “the left ear lock,” in the Yiddish expression ikh hob es in der linker peye, “I have it in the left ear lock,” or es…
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The Best Documentary Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of
Manny Kirchheimer is one of the New York City’s most under-appreciated documentary filmmakers. His film “Stations of the Elevated,” which is getting a retrospective theatrical run this week (Oct. 17 to Oct. 23) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is considered to be the first documentary about graffiti. However, calling “Stations of the Elevated a…
The Latest
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For David Bezmozgis, Fiction Must Go Far Beneath the Surface
The first thing I noticed about the writer David Bezmozgis when I sat down to breakfast with him in Brooklyn in late September was the tattoo on his forearm — a blue cursive Cyrillic D framed by a diamond. I first met Bezmozgis in 2010, and we’ve since become friends, and I’ve never shaken the…
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Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History
● Susan Sontag: A Biography By Daniel Schreiber Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer Northwestern University Press, 296 pages, $35 According to this welcome biography, which originally appeared in German in 2007, the artist Joseph Cornell believed that the American Jewish essayist and filmmaker Susan Sontag was the “great-great-grandmother of [French actor] Jean-Paul Belmondo……
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The Minivan Rabbi of Mississippi
Most rabbis wait for Jews to come to them. Rabbi Jeremy Simons goes to the Jews. As the new itinerant rabbi for the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Simons drives through 13 states, serving 110 congregations from Oklahoma to Virginia. When we met with him in his office at the ISJL, a squat brown building…
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7 Facts About Jewish Mississippi
1. Mississippi’s first official Jewish religious service is believed to have occurred in the port town of Natchez in 1800. 2. Perry Nussbaum, rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in Jackson, was heavily involved in the civil rights movement. In September 1967, the synagogue in Jackson was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members. In November of…
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Live-Blogging The Rapture and the Demise of Nicolas Cage
Why am I here? The question arises on many levels. On the surface, clearly, I’m here to review “Left Behind,” based on the second-best-selling series of books of all time (“Harry Potter” is the first). In theory, LB should be the biggest of a run of terrible Christian movies, including “Heaven is for Real” and…
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Books A Heartbreaking Work of Intellectual Fiction
Florence Gordon By Brian Morton Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $25 Those who spend enough time with the title character of Brian Morton’s novel “Florence Gordon” are both fixated on and frustrated by her. That applies to the characters in the novel — Florence’s family, friends and literary peers and acolytes — but may well…
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Books Holding a Vegan ‘Candle’ to Jewish Holiday Menu
Photography © 2014 by Jim Franco This is a sporadic column by personal chef Alix Wall, in which she evaluates a new cookbook by making some of its recipes, sharing them with friends and asking what they think of the results. When “Vegan Holiday Cooking from Candle Café: Celebratory Menus and Recipes from New York’s…
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Books Candle’s Vegan Chopped “Liver”
Photography © 2014 by Jim Franco Although this recipe is fairly labor-intensive, it is well worth the work. You may want to double the recipe since it disappears quickly from the table, and you may want to keep some for delicious leftovers. It is also best to make it the day before you’re planning to…
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Yiddish די ייִדישע גאַסנשילד פֿונעם פּאַריזער „פּלעצל“ איז צוגעגנבֿעט געוואָרןYiddish street sign for the Pletzel, the Yiddish quarter of Paris, is stolen
דער אינצידענט איז פֿאָרגעקומען בעת אַ ממשותדיקן וווּקס פֿון אַנטיסעמיטיזם אין פֿראַנקרײַך
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